nebajoth: yup. and they require a receiver of -84 dBm for this. meanwhile, some chips already do -103 dBm. if your noise floor is low enough, that could mean you get almost ten times the original distance.

of course, measuring anything with reasonable accuracy was quite hellish. instead of "add a wire and connect the scope probe" it was "make a custom coax cable and solder a connector right into the circuit"

what are your thoughts on case changes ? impossible ? small things, like cutting a hole ? bigger things, like moving holes ? anything is possible (i.e., a small change will be just as expensive as a big one) ?

of course, once the Ya serial number wraps from 99999999 to 00000000, the cost of a case change will probably be a very minor concern :) of course, then you may be more interested in choosing an adequate yacht :)

(scanning) so far, nobody seems to actually do anything with the scans. well, except for myself. they were quite useful for the counterweight. i still had to make changes after seeing the real thing in the real case, but it helped a lot to get there.

i just wish there was a plastic equivalent to lead/tin. those wooden molds are actually quite fun. incredibly cheap to make, and good for quite number of runs. yield is bad, because the heat distribution is all wrong, but on a good day, with the counterweight, about 80% are possible.

the molds would even as longer if i hadn't lazily (*) skipped some basics of mold-making of course. (*) actually, mainly because heekspython doesn't have the functions i would need for giving the molds a better shape. better shape would mean non-vertical walls and rounded corners.

right now, he seems to need mainly fpga experts. and all is done with xilinx's proprietary tools. to make this a useful linux system, a mmu would be highly desirable. that's currently missing. of course, with an fpga, it's "just" a software upgrade.

it's very hard to calculate costs for such small runs, essentially all participants continue to invest money (spend more than they make), although some bean counters may do some math on the components and come up with a 'bom' of maybe 100-200 USD

we don't want to make too few, cutting into or delaying valuable contributions, and also not too many, giving us a sales headache, especially if there are any problems with the boards (case is also missing)

Free fpga synthesis could get very very exciting. imagine being able to load your own hw accelerators into your cpu. need a one-round-of-AES instruction ? just load it. need a really quick arccosh(x)/x ? no problem. etc.

nebajoth: you write the "program" in verilog (a language a bit like C) or vhdl (a language a bit like COBOL), then feed it to a "compiler" that allocates the cells on the chip, connects then, and configures them. this is the synthesis.

this is a free CPU, it needs the help from a lot of free software people, because very few companies will help at the beginning, unlike proprietary CPUs where of course the proprietary companies like more 'open' software, it helps them sell their proprietary IP

the new firmware image for the ben looks pretty good, but gmu has been built without FLAC support. this should be changed for the final release. several people already asked about flac support on the ben